As a writer, I try to stay dialed into pop culture. It keeps the writing relevant, being able to reference a popular song or a hit movie when the task requires it.

This has never been a difficult undertaking for me, at least historically. But more and more, I seem to be more and more out of touch.

I used to wonder how people could do this, lose touch. I remember asking my mom why she didn’t know who so-and-so was during the 1990s. She would just shrug her shoulders and say, “I guess I’m getting old.”

That took me aback on more that one occasion. First, I didn’t see my mother as an old person. Second, I couldn’t imagine any process that would allow someone to simply wake up one morning and check out of the world.

Yet, I find this happening to me these days. Initially, I wanted to blame it on the state of pop culture. A lot of it, and I think this is being fair, is a re-tread of our youth. Same movies “reimagined,” same fashions, same fads. So that may be part of it. It’s a been-there, done-that problem.

But I can’t blame this detachment on that alone. I do, after all, know who Adele is. I even know who Ruth B is and am learning one of her songs. But I couldn’t pick Emily Blunt or Chris Hemsworth out of a police lineup.

I could spend time catching up on things, but I have come to realize that there is a reason I don’t.

I am getting older.

I know. No gasps. Just groans.

But go with me for a moment on this. My mind is still very sharp. I can remember the lyrics to about a hundred songs when I’m out performing and I can remember the kid in Mrs. Straub’s class who used to pick his nose. I can remember things like locker combinations and the favorite drink of someone I only dated a time or two years ago.

It’s not the mind. It’s not even the attention span. It’s the relevancy.

As I come ever closer to the 60 year mark (still a couple years away, don’t rush me), I have come to realize that a lot of my youth was spent in trivial pursuits. Things like who was topping the charts or who was sleeping with who in Hollywood. I had plenty of time for all this because I had plenty of time for all this.

But, the grains of sand in the hourglass are no longer in the upper half these days. Time is slipping by, if ever so slowly.

When we’re young, we have all the time in the world. We can dabble in pointless exercises – in mental masturbation about all the little things in life that we think are so important at the time.

But somewhere along the way, the teeter-totter tips to the other side of aging and we realize that what seemed so big in our youth is now complete nonsense. Mortality has crept into our lives and we start to realize that we wasted a lot of time on things that simply didn’t matter.

It never did, of course. But when time was on our side, we could entertain it all. We had to fill the time available.

But now, the clock on the old scoreboard in the game of life is winding down. Not in a morbid way where we contemplate the meaning of life or our own passage through time. Rather, we simply realize that our time here is limited, that things like money, prestige, power and such are in the nonsense category. What is really is important is love, peace, friendships, knowledge, meaningful pursuits, passion, empathy and enjoying every single moment of this thing we call life.

We don’t need the bullshit. We’ve already had plenty of it in our life and it led nowhere. We pulled the late nights to get ahead in work, we drank ourselves stupid because of a love gone wrong, we lost good friends over petty misunderstandings and we burned bridges when we should have been building them.

Lord knows, I’ve done my share. I’ve had to learn that life is indeed very fragile, and in the end, all that stuff we thought was so important, is meaningless.

Like pop culture. I don’t really care who won the Grammy for the Best Album of the Year. I won’t be watching the Oscars. I don’t really care. In fact, I have learned from my own life that the people getting the awards don’t really care either, unless they are young and full of themselves. Validation comes from doing your best always, not in some award in a popularity contest.

In the real world, there are no awards ceremonies. We don’t get a statue for managing to pay another month’s rent when we’re out of work or getting out of bed each and day after having our heart ripped out. We don’t even get a trophy for beating cancer or raising great kids who aren’t strung out on drugs or living in the Jungle in Seattle.

Life really is its own reward. As we get older, we just come to realize that most of the world is a complete waste of time. We come to find what is really important in our lives and we finally find the maturity and resolution to treat it with the respect it deserves and focus on it to the exclusion of almost everything else around us.

Pop culture be damned. Let the younger folks worry about what Zoe is wearing on the Red Carpet or the fact that Kanye is broke and another Kardashian is single again.

None of it matters in the end. Over that horizon, the one that is just beyond our reach, no one gives a shit that Bruce Jenner is wearing a dress.

Thankfully, that horizon is still off in the distance somewhere. I have a few more miles to go in this world, especially now that I don’t have to know who Drake is.

Wait, wasn’t he a pirate? Sir Francis… awe, who gives a sh**!

Just north of the Emerald City, thinking about having a pop culture clearance sale so I can clear my brain even more,

– Robb